When I say the word nationization, it brings fear into people’s hearts. The ideas of the state owning a certain industry to better control, regulate, and control it. Images come up of the state
forcibly taking over people’s hard owned property. Knocking down doors, in order to give everything to the state. The destroying of private property and the establishment or a state owned economy.
You will find many capitalist who think this idea will be the down fall of this country, but those people obviously have certain bias, and have no real respect for equality in the economy. Some
even argue that nationization will do nothing but create bureaucratic corruption and give the state too much power, and ultimately ruin our great economy, but is our economy so great in its current
state? How many recessions have we had in the last two hundred years? Anyone with a history book will tell you there’s been a lot since America came into existence. What can be done about it? Is
there a permanent solution that will just fix all the economies’ problems in one fell swoop? Well not really but the arguments for nationization of the economy have some strong points. The
nationization of the current economy is necessary in order to bring order to the current barbaric state of the economy, its controls industries that have so much power and influence over our lives,
and gives the general populations the ability to affect certain dimensions of our lives, the next time your local paper mill polities the local river, you and the rest of the community can have a
say so. So that next time, the river will be protected by the ballot. We live in a democracy, and many people have died in order to give us what we have today, the power to vote. Many people had to
sacrifice, not only in this country but in other countries as well, from the Greek renaissance to the French revolution, to the American Revolution. So what point is it to have achieved so much in
the regulation of the state, just to downplay all that advancement by giving the owners of industry the freedom to do what they want? Some American corporations make as much annually as some
countries, even some industrial countries. Such powerful industries have no right to do as they please, because their decisions affect everyone. Yet they live in a ‘free market’ economy, where they
believe they should have the freedom to do business as they please. This is why nationization is necessary, to belittle the power of the state is to belittle democracy and this is not acceptable.
If the state owns the economy, and the general population owns the state, then the people, by proxy, control the
economy.The Soviet Union is the most well known state owned economy and many argue that its failure
is because of that, but if that’s true then why after the fall of the Soviet Union smaller communist counties continued to exist and prosper? Yugoslavia is a good example, even after the fall
of the Soviet Union, it continued to prosper. 90+% of its economy was still state owned, and health care and schooling was free, doctors and teachers prospered and the economy was in good shape,
living standards was high. So what happened to Yugoslavia? Well its downfall certainly cannot be contributed to its state owned economy; there were more factors to put into consideration, many of
which are lessons for another day.Arguments against nationization, are varied and shallow, for
one, many people argue that a state owned economy will destroy our entrepreneurship and destroy own business freedoms. These aren’t really freedoms but self proclaimed rights, the rights to
practice business any way they want. This claim to freedom goes along with the claim of being able to own other human beings but this is of course not a god given freedom and should not be allowed
to exist, why give industries the power to do what they want? That kind of freedom is anarchy and has no place in a democracy. Another argument against nationization is the state is ineffective at
properly handling a business. This is a blunt lie, for as Michael Moore put it, we put our fire department, our police, our army, our paramedic services, in the hands of the state, exactly because
the state does things so effetely, unlike the previous private fire fighting industry, that was so ineffective, because the industry had no real intention of stopping fires, but to collect fire
insurance money, this made keeping fires under control, almost impossible in cities because if you didn’t have fire insurance, the fire department would ignore you. This kind of ineffectiveness has
no place in such a important industry, and this is why the industry had to be nationized.
The automobile industry has had a lot of problems recently, yet nationalization of this industry is becoming more and more necessary, for greedy CEOs and
chairman have corrupted the industry and the giving them tax-payers money only brings more corruption, it seems capitalist America thinks it can do what is wants with no real backlash, our economy
is utterly corrupted and they only solution is to take control of it. The bank industry is another example, due to greed, the banks are starting to fail, and again giving them bailout money, is a
temporary solutions to a permanent problem, and will not help in the long run. Quite the contrary, it will keep corruption on the rise in the bank system and will manage to piss a lot of taxpayers
off.
So in conclusion, taking over the economy may seem a bit radical, but it has the power to bring solutions
to problems we have had over and over again, from 1815 to present day. Should the state come in and limit people’s freedoms in order to bring morality and equality to society? We have fought a war
over the exact some reason in the past, and in that war we realized that sometimes the state has to tell people it is illegal to own another human being. It is not your “god-given right” to own
another human being, it is also not your ‘god-given right’ to sell people tuberculosis tainted pork. Liberty is impossible in a literal sense.